Friday, September 9, 2016

The Good News and Bad News in Gary Johnson’s Polls

Gary Johnson’s campaign for President has lately had a mix of bad and
good news in the polls — more on that in a moment — but the poll on the
front page of yesterday’s Washington Post definitely is one he will be talking about. Using SurveyMonkey online
methodology, the survey measured voter opinion in each of the 50 states
over the past month. And it finds the Libertarian candidate to be a
serious factor in the race.

The headline finding for Johnson is that he reaches 15 percent of the
vote or better in 15 states, and 10 percent or better in 42 states,
that is, all but eight. The states where he makes the strongest showing
are his own New Mexico (25 percent); Utah (23 percent); Alaska, Idaho,
and South Dakota (19 percent); Kansas (17 percent); Colorado, Iowa,
North Dakota, and Washington (16 percent); and Maine, Minnesota,
Nebraska, Rhode Island, and Wyoming (15 percent).
At the other end, the eight states that lag most in enthusiasm for
the mountain-climbing two-term governor are Louisiana and Maryland at 9
percent; Alabama, New Jersey, and New York at 8 percent; Hawaii and
Kentucky at 7 percent; and Mississippi at a mere 4 percent.
It’s hard to dismiss this as statistical noise associated with the
imperfections of measuring opinions in small states (where Johnson tends
to do best) because both his stronger states and weaker states form
coherent geographical clusters. If you were playing Game of the States,
you could hop a continuous path on the map through all but two of his
best states: Alaska, Idaho, Utah, New Mexico (a corner crossing, but the
Milton Bradley rules say that’s okay), then up to Iowa and around
Minnesota and the Dakotas to Wyoming. You’d still need to make it over
to Maine and Rhode Island, two New England states known for their love
of quirkiness, to finish collecting your biggest Johnson fans. The areas
of the country not yet enthusiastic about Gary likewise form
recognizable clusters: one in Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama, the other
New York-New Jersey-Maryland, plus Kentucky.

According to the new poll, Gary Johnson is not
far from overtaking Donald Trump for second place in his home state of
New Mexico, while in at least five states he’s within 10 points of
pushing Hillary Clinton into third place: Utah (where he trails her by
only 4 percent); Idaho and Wyoming (6 percent); and North and South
Dakota (10 percent).
In this fluid and surprising election year, with new revelations
coming daily and unexpected endorsements likely, anything could happen —
including a Johnson move into first place in states like Utah and New
Mexico. Yet the Commission on Presidential Debates — its rules and
behavior shaped over the years by loyalists of the two major parties —
could exclude him based on its calculation of whether he has reached an
average of 15 percent before each debate in five CPD-designated major
polls.
For better or worse, Johnson’s performance in national polls keeps
scattering widely — in six national polls to come out within the past
few days he’s scored 12 percent in NBC/SM and IBD, 11 percent in GWU, 9
percent in Fox, and only 7 percent in CNN and Rasmussen. While the new
WaPo/SM is consistent with the higher end of that range, the polls
preferred by the debate commission — unfortunately for Johnson — tend to
be the ones where he underperforms.
There is, of course, no single best way to design and weight a poll.
Outcomes for Johnson may vary greatly depending on the sampling of
independent voters (who contribute much of his strength) and technology
used (Johnson’s support skews dramatically young, which means his
supporters are more likely to lack landlines and engage online).
Like it or not, the debate commission’s methods are going to be
coming under intense scrutiny. Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld,
Johnson’s running mate, makes a good point here:
“They [the debate commission] have a duty to be non-partisan rather
than bipartisan.” That same distinction comes up in legislative
redistricting, where bipartisan line drawing can sometimes reach a very
different result (“You can protect your guys if we can protect
ours”) than a nonpartisan process would have done.
A truly nonpartisan commission would need to set some thresholds
and standards for debate admission: you don’t need to be a Republican
or Democratic partisan to see the problem with letting 12 small-party
candidates jostle with Clinton and Trump for camera time. But is there
much doubt that if the debate commission truly followed a non-partisan
rather than bipartisan course, Johnson (and perhaps also Green Party
nominee Jill Stein) would right now be in a position to practice their
zingers for the debate stage?